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A USD 110 mn African Development Bank (AfDB) loan will clean up Tunisia’s state chemical plants, which President Kais Saied says cannot operate until they are fixed. AfDB wrote the check for the state-owned Tunisian Chemical Group (GCT), Tunis Afrique Presse (TAP) reports, which the Economy Ministry said will be spent to cut air pollution and rehabilitate GCT plants at Gabès, Skhira, and M'Dhilla. Just last month, Saied said only repaired and upgraded units would be allowed to operate at Gabès as thousands of residents demanded to dismantle the site.
Tunis also guaranteed a EUR 111.5 mn AfDB loan to water utility SONEDE. It will renew c. 150 km of pipe serving nearly 2.7 mn people in Greater Tunis, where SONEDE logged about 1k outages a day in mid-July. The state wants Gabès’ output more than quadrupled by 2030, so the upgrade has to work before the expansion does.
Another cloud rolls in
Alibaba will expand its data center footprint in the UAE as part of a push into Europe and the Middle East, Alibaba Cloud CTO Li Feifei was quoted as saying by Bloomberg at the company’s Apsara conference in Hangzhou. The UAE is on the expansion list alongside Malaysia, Germany, France, and Hong Kong. The e-commerce giant will open its first cloud regions in Turkey, Finland, and the Netherlands over the next 12 months. No figures or timeline were given for the UAE expansion.
The bigger picture: The expansion feeds Alibaba’s plan to build a 20 GW global data center network by 2032, which Citi estimates could generate more than USD 160 bn in external cloud revenue. It also puts Alibaba in more direct competition with Amazon and Alphabet outside Asia, just as Washington pushes other countries to favor US technology over Chinese alternatives.
Made in the zone
A new integrated manufacturing and service hub is coming to Qatar’s freezones, initially focused on the machining, maintenance, and servicing of Honeywell Sundyne pumps for the energy and process sectors. Qatar Free Zones Authority and Honeywell Technologies signed an MoU to establish the facility, which will serve both local and regional MENA markets.
SOUND SMART- Sundynes are high-speed, integrally geared centrifugal pumps engineered to deliver high pressure at lower fluid flow rates across demanding oil, gas, and chemical processing operations.
